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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

moved Amendment No. 18: 18: Clause 5 , page 4, line 43, leave out paragraph (c) The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 19. Amendment No. 18 would cancel the blanket exemption given to the police services in respect of the duty of care owed to members of the public in the carrying out of policing or the policing of law-enforcing activities. Amendment No. 19 seeks substantively to redefine the duty of care owed by the police towards members of the public and the separate duty of care owed to its own employees in respect of hazardous training. Proposed new subsection (3) of AmendmentNo. 19 sets out the parameters of care that would be owed by the police force to the public and to its own employees undertaking hazardous training. Proposed new subsection (3A) would ensure that, before returning a guilty verdict, the jury would have to be satisfied that there had been a gross breach of a duty of care—that a body’s conduct had fallen farbelow what could reasonably be expected in the circumstances. That consideration would be circumscribed by the factors that the jury would have to take into account under paragraphs (a) to (d) of subsection (3A)—namely, the nature of the activity or training and the context in which it was performed; other relevant duties to which the organisation was subject; resource constraints; and public interest considerations. I believe that that is a fairly comprehensive list of mitigating factors, and rightly so, for the purposeof the amendment is not to turn the police service or anyone within it into a scapegoat or to proscribe the extent to which it can carry out hazardous activities. Rather, it is intended to ensure that the admirable aim of the Bill to provide an incentive not to carry out functions in a grossly negligent manner would also apply to the police service. The Minister will recall—I think that I mentioned it in Committee—the 2000 agreement between the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Health and Safety Executive and the Home Office, which established that the Health and Safety Executive should inspect training areas where hazardous training is being undertaken. The clear principle behind that agreement was that, while one could reasonably expect the training on the day to be hazardous to a certain extent, there was the possibility to mitigate that potential danger through thorough preparation. The amendment would not enable a prosecution of a police force when an individual had died as a result of the necessarily hazardous nature of compulsory and necessary training, but it would ensure that where training that need not have been so hazardous in nature has been provided in a grossly negligent manner, resulting in a death, the body responsible could be held to account. The broad range of mitigating factors seriously limits the application of the offence to all hazardous training. Its sole function is to enable a judge and jury to determine whether in so far as an organisation were able, in its capacity as an organising body corporate, to seek to prevent a death in given circumstances, it did so. I believe that is not an unreasonable request and I hope that in its new, slim-line, simplified form the Minister will at least be able to consider the amendment. I beg to move.